Bringing
spirituality into the culture of business, advocates believe, will not
only enhance the quality of individual working lives, but also
drastically alter the broader conduct of business across the planet.

Aiming
at nothing less than a wholesale change in human consciousness,
workplace spirituality has the trappings of a full-fledged religious
movement—but whose religion? And what’s behind it?

The first round of scholarship on this movement -- David Miller's God at Work and Lake Lambert III's Spirituality, Inc.
-- tended to be overly close to the sources. Both tried to relate what
the movement was about without being too critical of it. Whether this
was intentional or not is debatable. Miller has a whole initiative at Princeton
devoted to studying workplace spirituality and it certainly seems like
he's in favor of it as a kind of "better" way to do business. Lambert
III's book likewise deems workplace spirituality as a type of
"religious" experience worth serious consideration by scholars, but as Brittany Shoot's review of the book for RD noted,
"capitalism [in Lambert III's treatment] is not examined as a
potentially harmful system to some group of workers down the line."

Lorusso is a part of the second round of scholarship on this movement, one that -- as Dan Williams points out -- has been led by historical inquiries into evangelical contributions to contemporary corporatism.
In general, those in the second round are more critical, arguing that,
at best, spirituality provides a kind of "psychological wage" for those
working for self-described spiritual companies. At worst, it fosters
spirituality onto people's workaday life or provides a thinly-veiled
cover for abuse. Lorusso's forthcoming dissertation will undoubtedly
add to this scholarship by redirecting our attention toward the
spiritual capitalists and capitalism that Lambert III studied, albeit
with a more critical lens and, hopefully, with an eye toward
understanding religious/spiritual constructions, appropriations, and
inconsistencies inside companies as often dynamic and debated.